The Open Conspiracy

‘The aliens are not coming—they are already here and they have infiltrated human society while looking human.’ (David Icke, Renegade, 2020)

Resistance to the open conspiracy is readily dismissible as reactionary nationalism, nativism, racism, anti-cosmopolitanism, fighting against progress toward a world republic; selfish, futile, short-sighted, etc. It does, however, have a historical precedent. The texts of H.G. Wells reveal the tensions and contradictions at work in this moment.

In the The New World Order (1940), Wells touted ‘western-spirited collectivism’, ‘a liberal triumph over the dogmatism of the class war’, and ‘a change in directive ideas’. He is clear that involves ‘[a] sort of massacre of small and independent businesses’. His fiction shows that he was acutely aware of the pitfalls of this project:

Mr. Sempack left his politics and economics; the sure hope of the One World State and the One World Business floating benevolently in their mental skies … “We have got clear to the conception of a possible world peace, a world economic system, a common currency, and unparalleled freedoms, growths and liberties.” (Meanwhile (The Picture of a Lady), 1927)

Globalisation as universal peace with its ‘sort of fairy-tale plausibility’ (Star-Begotten, 1937) was a major preoccupation. This complex has returned today along with the fear of global domination and recolonisation whereby we become human raw material to be put at the disposal of superior beings and their creations.

Does technological development privilege multi-national corporations over accountable state politics? Beyond the conspiracy that there is no conspiracy, lies the possibility that those who are so cold blooded are not human. Universalise the key principle of colonialism (resource extraction; expendable natives) and you arrive at alien invasion and world domination: ‘humanity undergoes—dehumanization’. ‘They are experimenting with human mutations.’ (Star-Begotten)

Echoing Wells’s science fictions, the ghost of colonialism haunts those feeling powerless before technology and its controllers. As Zulu Shaman Credo Mutwa puts it in The Reptillian Agenda, if the dictators (Chitauri) are not even human, who controls the controllers? Has the open conspiracy mutated into an anti-human agenda that recalls the contradictions of the colonial economy? If colonialism is the way of history, why should our future be any different from the past? Yet who (or what) would want to enslave humanity and destroy the world economy? When the independent producer (primordial or otherwise) is being undermined, who benefits?

It is worth noting that the projection of the non-human antagonist is eminently rational. According to Immanuel Kant, the existence of rational aliens accords with the possibility that reason is not limited to human beings. To assume anything else is to presume that we are the only rational creatures or that other rational creature’s reason like us. It is, as Critique of Practical Reason (1788) explains, to substitute habit for cognition ‘in a way similar to animals’:

For merely because we are not familiar with rational beings other than the human being, we would have a right to assume them to be constituted just as we cognize ourselves to be, i.e., we actually would be familiar with them.

To assume that other rational beings lack ‘a different way of presenting [Vorstellungsart: picturing]’ is to propose ‘that our ignorance would render us greater services for expanding our cognition than any meditation’. It is pure ignorance to assume that we are alone.

According to the reptilian hypothesis, they are rational but anti-human, and their rationality seems psychopathic from our point of view. The prospect of our expendability confirms the psychopathology of those lacking empathy and remorse. Picture us as the hunted animal contemplating its predators, as the animal views carnivorous man, and the lizard hypothesis does not appear so irrational.

 When the inhumanity of the system is projected onto its beneficiaries, the rest of us, except for the collaborators, are left in the position analogous to that of the colonised: ‘a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away’ (The War of the Worlds, 1898). If alien invasion is the exception that proves the rule, it can capture the spectacle of a threatening non-human force.

Yet at the outset, there is a problem with this analysis. Seeing oneself in the position of the colonised might entail sympathy with the victims of colonialism. Yet it also vindicates colonialism in so far as the framework of colonial relations is naturalised: colonise or be colonised! The War of the Worlds:

And before we judge of them [the Martians] too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

The key, of course, is context and the capacity of the anti-colonial paradigm to address the question of sovereignty (of the oppressed, the marginalised, the exploited, the colonised) digested by the supra-sovereignty of a universal cosmopolitan existence:

Non-resistance, the restriction of activities to moral suasion is no part of the programme of the Open Conspiracy. The forces of the entire movement may be mobilized in a variety of ways to bring pressure upon reactionary schools and institutions ... In the face of unscrupulous opposition creative ideas must become aggressive, must define their enemies and attack them … (The Open Conspiracy, 1928)

Wells’s grappling with the idea of that World State suggests that proponents of globalisation can easily take this objection in their stride. A supra-national one world order will transcend the partiality and competitiveness of colonialism/imperialism in the name of humanity.

Anti-semite and conspiracy theorist Nesta Webster argued that Wells’s World State played into the hands of the Illuminate (see her Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, 1924). For his part, Wells argued that writers like Webster are important and must be read and debated, not merely dismissed, because they reveal ideas that circulate in more polite society:

I should describe Mrs. Nesta Webster as a perfectly sane and capable person with insane ideas, so widely do I disagree with her. I believe her influence has spread far beyond the circle of her actual readers. Milder forms of the same intellectual malaise at any rate are now very prevalent throughout the more prosperous classes in Great Britain and America. It is the only way to account for the behavior of Mr. Neville Chamberlain, for example, or Lord Rothermere, the British newspaper proprietor, towards the Jews, towards Russia, during the past two or three years. (The Fate of Man, 1939)

Then as now everything hinges on who controls the controllers of the agenda? Who would want to destroy small and medium businesses, and institute a cashless society that will undermine national sovereignty? For to undermine the autonomy of national currency is to undermine national sovereignty in the name of the sovereignty of humanity and the decolonisation of the political. Is the failed state, then, a prerequisite of progress?

In Wells’s cosmopolitanism with a vengeance all the weight of the Open Conspiracy will be ‘on the side of world order and against that sort of local independence which holds back its subject people from citizenship of the world’ (The Open Conspiracy). In a state of globalisation, a responsible world directorate serving the common ends of humanity will oversee the substitution of large-scale business for the multitude of small scale businesses. However, by 1940 Wells had concluded:

It is not necessary to destroy existing governments as such. The idea of a federal world does not involve the creation of a common world government resembling the sovereign governments of the present time, pushing them aside and taking their place like a conqueror. It does not threaten in the least the racial and cultural distinctions of mankind. (The Common Sense of War and Peace, 1940)

However, declarations of human rights and commitment to freedom of speech require enforcement. And war. Otherwise one is left appealing to fairness in the face of the dispensers of progress: ‘all as vain as the bleating of lost sheep’ (The New World Order).

(Olaf Stapledon describes the situation after the Euro-American war: ‘The planet was now a delicately organized economic unit, and big business in all lands was emphatically contemptuous of patriotism’ (Last and First Men, 1930). After war between the America and China over diminishing fossil fuels the first World State emerged. Improved living conditions for the majority but workers reduced to slaves under the tutelage of a fusion of religion and science.)

In such a context the worst possible outcome would be a state weakened, for example, by corruption and/or incompetence. International agencies would then be seen as means of disciplining national leaders who would attempt to use that lever to assert their national hegemony. Working at one and the same time to shore up national sovereignty and abandon the nation state they will hope to save themselves by ascending to the safe haven of global governance. Leaving the wreckage of a weakened state, the national bourgeoisie would present themselves as defenders of the remains of national sovereignty and loyal intermediaries hammering out a necessary compromise. Behind the scenes they would sell out the nation state and humanity. Is the colonialist trick—offer oneself as the solution to the problems one has created—to be repeated simultaneously at the national and the global level?

Amid chains of suspicion and technological explosion the planetary allegory of colonialism, mixing retribution and paranoia, strikes a chord today and indicates the felt balance of power. Those working for freedom face an aristocracy of vested interests. The coordinates of colonialism as world unification provide a cognitive map for globalisation with humans as standing-reserve, a resource to be used or discarded, effectively subject alien intention.

Fear of the ‘progressive enslavement of the race’ (The Shape of Things to Come, 1933) does not need aliens or lizards to explain how ideology works. An epidemic of sophistry and censorship points to a species wide (i.e., global) power struggle. ‘How far is our intellectual freedom here still ours only because, as a matter of fact, we are too discreet to exercise it?’ (Star-Begotten)

Are we witnessing the intellectual unification that Wells prophesied, or the descent into confusion and suspicion that precedes world war? With technology offering total surveillance and control, and the prospect of ‘a new world money’ (The New World Order), what is to counter a centrally dictated dependency on the one percent? In such a context, if you are not paranoid, you are not paying attention.

‘He ended war for ever. He did. He rationalised property and money. He inaugurated the Age of Plenty. He reconstructed world education’ [but ultimately he too will become] ‘[j]ust a memorial of reptilian energy, vestiges of a slobber in the mud.’ (The Holy Terror, 1939)

References

Mutwa, Credo 2004. In: “David Icke & Credo Mutwa—The Reptilian Agenda (Part 1).” Youtube.

Icke, David 2020. “Renegade: the Life Story of David Icke.” Youtube. RENEGADE : THE LIFE STORY OF DAVID ICKE - YouTube

Kant, I. 1788 [1996]. Critique of Practical Reason. In: Practical Philosophy. Edited and translated Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 133-271.

Stapledon, O. 1930 [1999]. Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future. London: Millennium. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Last_and_First_Men.pdf

Webster, N.H. 1924. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements. London: Boswell Printing & Publishing Co., Ltd. https://archive.org/details/SecretSocietiesAndSubversiveMovementsNe staHelenWebster

Wells, H.G. 1898 [2012]. The War of the Worlds. UK: Penguin Books.

---- 1927. Meanwhile (The Picture of a Lady). New York: George H. Doran Company.

---- 1928. The Open Conspiracy: What are We to Do with Our Lives? Dumfries & Galloway: Anodos Books.

---- 1933. The Shape of Things to Come. The Ultimate Revolution. London: Hutchinson & Co.

---- 1937. Star-Begotten. A Biological Fantasia. New York: The Viking Press. https://archive.org/details/WellsH.G.StarBegotten1937

---- 1939. The Fate of Man. New York: Alliance Book Corporation, Longman Green & Co. https://archive.org/details/fateofman013812mbp

---- 1939. The Holy Terror. London: Michael Joseph. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608211h.html

---- 1940. The New World Order. Whether it is attainable, how it can be attained, and what sort of world a world at peace will have to be. London: Secker & Warburg. https://archive.org/details/TheNewWorldOrder

---- 1940 [2016] The Common Sense of War and Peace: World Revolution or War Unending. Read Books Ltd.